Cloud-based data security platform Open Raven announced Tuesday that it raised a $15 million Series A round four months after it emerged from stealth to announce seed funding.
The round was led by Kleiner Perkins as well as existing investors like Upfront Ventures, bringing its total capital raised to $19.1 million.
<p>Open Raven is also backed by former Goldman Sachs Chief Information Risk Officer Phil Venables, who is also on the company's board of directors; RSA's former chief strategy officer Niloo Razi Howe; and another cybersecurity firm, Signal Sciences, whose CEO Andrew Peterson also calls L.A. home.</p><p>The company said in a news release that the new capital will be used to accelerate Open Raven's growth by expanding key functions in engineering, customer support, sales and marketing. The company also announced that Bucky Moore, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, also joined the Open Raven board of directors.</p><p>"The transition to the cloud and out of physical data centers means that data stores change more quickly than ever before – leaving numerous unanswered questions," said Dave Cole, co-founder and CEO of Open Raven, in a statement. "Security and cloud infrastructure teams are wondering, 'what AWS accounts don't we know about?' 'Is there any data at risk right now?'"</p><p>Cole was a former chief product officer for Crowdstrike and Tenable Network Security. His co-founder is Mark Curphey, who founded SourceClear and previously worked at Microsoft.</p><p>Cole told dot.LA in February that the company aims to combat the ever increasing number of data breaches that have sucked up consumer data with open source tools.</p><p>The platform maps all cloud data stores, identifies the data within them, pinpoints significant exposures and lets teams fix them before they become security incidents, according to Open Raven. It also allows for real-time monitoring.</p><p>Their security product is free — though users can opt to pay for a higher-powered version — and created to be friendly for those who aren't trained in data security, Cole said. Open Raven uses a 3D map that helps visualize their systems so users can clearly see where data is and whether it's secured.</p><p>"We're giving organizations the ability to take charge of their data and explore their environments from any angle in order to truly understand their risk of cloud data breaches," Cole said in a statement Tuesday.</p><p>A Gartner Inc. report found that by 2022, 75% of all databases will be on a cloud platform. The sprawl of data across cloud environments is not the scenario that more traditional data loss and breach prevention tools were designed to control.</p><p>"Today's data security problem bears little resemblance to the historical challenges that drove the creation of the last generation of products," said Moore. "Unlike legacy solutions...Open Raven solves for modern complexity with a platform purpose-built for the massive data exposure issue."</p><p>The company said Tuesday that its "Open Raven Community Edition" is now generally available and delivers real-time data leak monitoring to proactively uncover cloud data that's exposed before they become security incidents.</p><p>The platform shows every Amazon Web Services account and asset, for example, from every angle in a global 3D map that makes it easy for security teams to maintain compliance and prevent data mishaps, Open Raven said. </p><p>Open Raven's "preview edition" of its platform has been deployed since February at "numerous global organizations" in industries including automotive, gaming, financial technology and software, the company said.</p><p><em>__</em></p><em>Do you have a story that needs to be told? My DMs are open on Twitter </em><a href="https://twitter.com/latams" target="_blank"><em>@latams</em></a><em>. You can also </em><em>email me at tami(at)dot.la</em><em></em><em>, or ask for my Signal.</em>
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George Kurtz, co-founder and CEO of the cloud-native endpoint security platform CrowdStrike, says executives should be obsessed with culture. Everyone below him must be fanatical about customer success and outcome and if they aren't fitting in, they need to go quickly. It's one of the biggest lessons he's learned as CEO.
"Not one time have I regretted firing someone too fast," Kurtz told a lunchtime crowd at the first day of the Montgomery Summit in Santa Monica. "It's that I waited too long."
<p>Kurtz founded the company in Sunnyvale, CA, in 2011 and it went public last year. He was joined on a panel by John Chambers, the former executive chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems, who said he bought 180 companies during his tenure. But he did not acquire a company that was not a very close cultural fit. </p><p>"I walked on one of the bigger acquisitions we were going to do," Chambers said. "Culture is as important as strategy and vision and I did not understand that when I was a young CEO."</p><p>Chambers said he was proud of Cisco's 95% employee retention rate when he was CEO, which is well above the industry average. He oversaw a rigorous hiring process to make sure candidates were right.</p><p>"If you're not interviewing through 10 people, you're not doing the screening process properly," Chambers said.</p><p>If an executive wanted to jump to a competitor, he would try to find out what was at the root of someone's unhappiness. The number one factor: Dissatisfaction with their immediate supervisor. </p>
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It's not exactly common knowledge, but back in the early aughts Los Angeles was more of an infosec town than a tech town. Such firms have, in recent years, been more likely to open up new offices in cities like San Francisco, Boston or Washington, D.C.
But on Tuesday, a new L.A.-based cybersecurity firm called Open Raven announced it has raised $4.1 million in seed funding led by Kara Nortman, a partner at Upfront Ventures and backed by former Goldman Sachs chief information risk officer Phil Venables, who is is also on the company's board of directors; RSA's former chief strategy officer Niloo Razi Howe; and another cybersecurity firm, Signal Sciences, whose CEO Andrew Peterson also calls L.A. home.
<p>Open Raven's co-founder Dave Cole, a former chief product officer for Crowdstrike and Tenable Network Security, said in an interview that the company aims to combat the ever increasing number of data breaches that have sucked up consumer data with open source tools. Open Raven's other co-founder is Mark Curphey, who founded SourceClear and previously worked at Microsoft.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<a href="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMjY3NDI1MC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTU5NzQ2MTYzNn0.G7TwnVgrVphPSzOObEZJpAhjuiYpWlt_AF3H08EXx6U/img.jpg?width=980" target="_blank"><img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yMjY3NDI1MC9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY2MDUzMzYzNn0.FO0Y1aFOQRmdPDeNGFT3aLuttmaBpnvI79eJ1M-VFwQ/img.jpg?width=980" id="a2600" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="fa85b4d7fd7b522cbd4f85c169154324" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" /></a>
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Image courtesy of Open Raven</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="add photo credit...">Open Raven aims to combat the ever increasing number of data breaches that have sucked up consumer data with open source tools.</small>
</p><p>"There's nearly a new story every day," Cole said. "A lot of these are instances where an org simply lost control of what data they had where, and it ended up on the internet. And people found it before they did."<br/></p><p>Over the last decade, Americans have been hit with the constant drumbeat of data breaches, from Equifax to Capital One. The U.S. Department of Justice on Monday charged four members of China's military with hacking credit bureau firm Equifax in 2017 and impacting the personal data of 145 million Americans. But Cole notes that the majority of data breaches aren't Russia, Iran or China hackings, but accidental data exposures.</p><p>Their security product is free — though users can opt to pay for a higher-powered version — and created to be friendly for those who aren't trained in data security, Cole said. Open Raven uses a 3D map that helps visualize their systems so users can clearly see where data is and whether it's secured.<br/></p><p>Cole said the company will make its "core discovery capabilities" open source under a permissive Apache 2.0 license later this year.</p><p>In a news release, the company described the increasing web of regulatory frameworks that firms must wade through, though it's unclear whether Open Raven is currently set up to deal with privacy regulations like Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or the California Consumer Privacy Act. Cole did not immediately respond to follow-up questions on the issue.</p><p>"Beyond the obvious market opportunity, I was drawn to this team's commitment to team building, brand building and user experience building from day one," Nortman of Upfront Ventures said in a post online.</p><p><em>__</em></p><p><em>Do you have a story that needs to be told? My DMs are open on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/latams" target="_blank">@latams</a>. You can also <a href="mailto:mailto:tami@dot.la" target="_self">email me</a>, or ask for my Signal.</em></p><p><i>Upfront Ventures is a minority, non-controlling investor in dot.LA</i></p><p><i><br/></i></p>
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